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krystalxu

'Russia in the doldrums?': new U.S. sanctions to weigh on recovery | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...eigh-on-recovery-idUSKBN1HG2IT

russia u s recovery

shared by krystalxu on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • MOSCOW (Reuters) - An escalation in U.S. sanctions against Moscow risks derailing a fragile recovery in Russia’s economy, which had just begun to take hold after the Kremlin’s last confrontation with the West in 2014, analysts and investors said on Monday.
anonymous

Italy government: Leaders talk amid political crisis - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-44297731

crisis politics Italy impeachment

shared by anonymous on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  • Reports suggest PM-designate Carlo Cottarelli may be stepping back from forming a technocratic government.
  • The two big winners in that election - Five Star and The League - attempted to join forces on Sunday but abandoned efforts after President Sergio Matarella vetoed their choice of finance minister.
  • Impeachment of three previous Italian presidents has been attempted but failed. Impeachment is approved by a simple majority of both houses of parliament, but the final decision rests with the constitutional court.
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  • His choice for prime minister, Mr Cottarelli, an ex-IMF economist, appears to have failed to secure support from major political parties and may not even bother to be sworn in.
  • He appears to have suspended his own efforts to form an interim administration and could instead be giving Five Star and The League a second chance, says BBC Rome Correspondent James Reynolds.
  • Investors are once again worried about the stability of the eurozone should Eurosceptic parties form the next government.
  • The costs of servicing Italy's debt have risen, but the BBC World Service economics correspondent, Andrew Walker, says we are not yet near the levels of financial stress that were evident in the peak of the eurozone financial crisis in 2011-12.
Javier E

Opinion | The Millionaires Are Fleeing. Maybe You Should, Too. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onaires-fleeing-migration.html

rich capital flight emigrants resident

shared by Javier E on 03 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • When a country begins to fall into economic and political difficulty, wealthy people are often the first to ship their money to safer havens abroad. The rich don’t always emigrate along with their money, but when they do, it is an even more telling sign of trouble.
  • Since 2013, New World Wealth, a research outfit based in South Africa, has been tracking millionaire migrations by culling property records, visa programs, news media reports and information from travel agents and others who cater to the wealthy.
  • In a global population of 15 million people each worth more than $1 million in net assets, nearly 100,000 changed their country of residence last year.
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  • In most countries it is fair to assume that any millionaire exodus is composed mainly of locals, and not foreign investors, because the wealthy classes will be dominated by citizens or longtime residents.
  • In 2017, the largest exoduses came out of Turkey (where a stunning 12 percent of the millionaire population emigrated) and Venezuela. As if on cue, the Turkish lira is now in a free fall.
  • matched the flight from the stagnant and sanction-battered economy of Russia, which also lost 2 percent of its millionaire population.
  • Until 2016, Britain had a sizable influx of millionaires every year, but the flow suddenly reversed last year with a net exodus of 3,000, amid fears that as Britain exits the European Union, London will fade as a financial capital. It did not help that in 2017 the government raised taxes on foreigners who buy property.
  • France had long been seen as the anti-Britain, a left-leaning bastion of prying bureaucrats and high taxes that scared off the wealthy, despite the charms of Paris. But the growing exodus of millionaires peaked in 2016 with a net outflow of 12,000, then slowed sharply to just 4,000 last year.
  • Stunningly, India in 2017 suffered a net loss of 7,000 members, or 2 percent, of its millionaire population. That exodus came despite global optimism about India’s growth prospects
  • On the flip side, slowing outflows can be a welcome sign, and in 2017 the biggest shift for the better came in that caldron of anti-rich hostility, France.
  • n the worst cases, bouts of capital flight can gain momentum until the value of the currency collapses, plunging the nation into crisis. Balance of payments records show that 10 of the last 12 major currency crises, dating back to the Mexican peso meltdown of 1994, began when residents started sending money abroad, which was typically two years before the currency collapsed
  • Right now, this forensic accounting offers clear evidence of looming financial difficulty in only one major country: Turkey. Starting early last year, affluent Turks began effectively moving large sums of money out of the country
  • The losses for India, Russia and Turkey were gains for havens like Canada and Australia
  • joined lately by the United Arab Emirates. Owing largely to the stability and glitter of the most famous emirate, Dubai, the United Arab Emirates in 2017 had a net inflow of 5,000 millionaires, increasing the size of its affluent population by 6 percent, the largest gain in the world
Javier E

What if Reporters Covered the Climate Crisis Like Edward R. Murrow Covered the Start of World War II? | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...imate-change-media-murrow-boys

global warming crisis reporting journalism

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • because of the looming possibility of extinction, and in response to it from the emerging leadership among young people, we have reached a “climate moment” with real momentum, and our challenge as we go forward is to dramatically change the zeitgeist—“to lock in and consolidate public opinion that’s finally beginning to come into focus.”
  • It was 54 years ago, early in 1965, at the White House. Before I became President Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary (“over my dead body,” I might add), I was his special assistant coordinating domestic policy. One day, two members of the president’s science-advisory committee came by the offic
  • he had shaken up the prevailing consensus that the oceans were massive enough to soak up any amount of excess of carbon released on earth. Not so, Revelle discovered; the peculiar chemistry of sea water actually prevents this from happening. Now, he said, humans have begun a “vast geophysical experiment.” We were about to burn, within a few generations, the fossil fuels that had slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. Burning so much oil, gas, and coal would release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it would trap heat that otherwise would escape into space. Earth’s temperature could rise, causing polar ice to melt and sea levels to rise, flooding the earth’s coastal regions.
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  • Revelle and his colleagues got the green light, and by the fall of 1965 they produced the first official report to any government anywhere on the possible threat to humanity from rising CO2 levels. On November 6, Lyndon Johnson became the first president to mention the threat in a message to Congress.
  • Our own global-warming “phony war” is over. The hot war is here.
  • But we failed the moment. One year later, largely preoccupied with the war in Vietnam, the president grew distracted, budgets for other priorities were squeezed, and the nation was fast polarizing. We flunked that first chance to confront global warming
  • the powers in New York resisted. Through the rest of 1939 and into the spring of 1940, Hitler hunched on the borders of France and the Low Countries, his Panzers idling, poised to strike. Shirer fumed, “My God! Here was the old continent on the brink of war…and the network was most reluctant to provide five minutes a day from here to report it.” Just as the networks and cable channels provide practically no coverage today of global warming.
  • President Johnson urged us to circulate the report widely throughout the government and to the public, despite its controversial emphasis on the need for “economic incentives” to discourage pollution, including—shudder!—taxes levied against polluters. (You can go online to “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment—1965,” and read the entire 23-page section, headlined Appendix Y4—Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.)
  • The networks put their reporters out in raincoats or standing behind police barriers as flames consume far hills. Yet we rarely hear the words “global warming” or “climate disruption” in their reports. The big backstory of rising CO2 levels, escalating drought, collateral damage, cause and effect, and politicians on the take from fossil-fuel companies? Forget all that. Not good for ratings, say network executives
  • But last October, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientifically conservative body, gave us 12 years to make massive changes to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions 45 percent below 2010 levels and to net zero by 2050
  • On his indispensable site, TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt writes that humanity is now on a suicide watch.
  • Here’s the good news: While describing David Wallace-Wells’s stunning new book The Uninhabitable Earth as a remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet, The New York Times reports it also offers hope. Wallace-Wells says that “We have all the tools we need…to aggressively phase out dirty energy…; [cut] global emissions…[and] scrub carbon from the atmosphere…. [There are] ‘obvious’ and ‘available,’ [if costly,] solutions.” What we need, he adds, is the “acceptance of responsibility.”
  • Late 1940. The start of the Blitz, with bombs blasting London to bits. A Gallup poll that September found that a mere 16 percent of Americans supported sending US aid to beleaguered Britain. Olson and Cloud tell us that “One month later, as bombs fell on London, and Murrow and the Boys brought the reality of it into American living rooms, 52 percent thought more aid should be sent.”
  • With no silver bullet, what do we do? We cooperate as kindred spirits on a mission of public service. We create partnerships to share resources. We challenge media owners and investors to act in the public interest. We keep the whole picture in our heads—how melting ice sheets in the Arctic can create devastation in the Midwest—and connect the dots for our readers, viewers, and listeners
Javier E

US-China trade war and interest rate rises spell losses for the super-rich | News | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...pell-losses-for-the-super-rich

rich wealth global

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • After seven years of steadily rising wealth, the richest people on the planet saw the combined value of their assets slide by 3% from a year earlier to stand at $68.1tn as financial markets plunged against a backdrop of rising tensions, with China hit the hardest by the decline
  • According to the annual world wealth report from the consultancy firm Capgemini, which surveys the global elite, the number of “high net worth individuals” (HNWI) dropped by about 100,000 to stand at 18 million.
  • A high net worth individual is defined as anyone with $1m (£641,000) or more in “investable assets”. The definition excludes the value of a main home and of any consumer durables such as cars
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  • Asia accounted for about $1tn of the decline in the total wealth of the world’s super-rich, with China accounting for more than a quarter of the fall in total HNWI wealth against a backdrop of plunging Chinese stock markets.
  • HNWI wealth declined across nearly all other regions: Latin America declined by 4%, Europe by 3% and North America by 1%, while wealth rose by 4% in the Middle East. The total wealth of the US super-rich declined by 1%, despite US GDP rising and the rate of unemployment dropping to the lowest level since the 1960s
  • In the worst annual performance since the financial crisis, the widespread turmoil dragged the FTSE All-World index down 11.5%. More than £240bn was erased from the value of London-listed shares, while the Shanghai composite index crashed by 25%, leaving investors suffering heavy losses.
  • The 18 million HNWI individuals have at least $3m each, on average, while the total wealth pile of $68.1tn is almost worth as much as the total output of the world economy each year
  • Oxfam warned earlier this year that the rising concentration of the world’s wealth meant 26 billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.
  • nearly half of all global pay is scooped up by the top 10% of workers, while the lowest-paid 50% receive only 6.4%.
Javier E

Moody's Analytics says climate change could cost $69 trillion by 2100 - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-916d-9c61607d8190_story.html

climate change cost crisis

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, increasingly seen by scientists as a climate-stabilizing limit, would still cause $54 trillion in damages by the end of the century.
  • rising temperatures will “universally hurt worker health and productivity” and that more frequent extreme weather events “will increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property.”
  • Climate change, Zandi said, is “not a cliff event. It’s not a shock to the economy. It’s more like a corrosive.” But, he added, it’s one that is “getting weightier with each passing year.
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  • Moody’s Investors Service, a major credit ratings agency, has already said that it wants to take climate into account when weighing the financial health of companies and municipalities.
  • t says that “water- and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will likely be the largest direct effect of changes in human health and the associated productivity loss.”
  • The hardest-hit economies will be some of the fastest-growing ones — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the report says.
  • report also forecasts lower oil and natural gas demand, dealing a blow to oil-exporting countries, especially in the Middle East. It forecasts that Saudi GDP will drop more than 10 percent by 2048; the kingdom would be the country harmed the most by climate change, hurting government revenue
  • Of the 12 largest economies, India will be the worst hit, the report says, with GDP growing 2.5 percentage points more slowly than it would without the effects of climate change
  • The country’s service industry will be hit by heat stress, agricultural productivity will fall, and health-care costs will climb
  • the scenarios only go through 2048. The Moody’s report says “the distress compounds over time and is far more severe in the second half of the century.”
  • He added: “Most of the models go out 30 years, but, really, the damage to the economy is in the next half-century, and we haven’t developed the tools to look out that far.”
  • That’s why it is so hard to get people focused on this issue and get a comprehensive policy response,” Zandi said. “Business is focused on the next year, or five years out.”
  • Chubb, one of the biggest insurance firms in the United States, on Monday said it would no longer sell insurance to new coal-fired power plants or sell new policies to companies that derive more than 30 percent of their revenue from the mining of coal used in power plants.
  • Hammond said that the company still needs to stop insuring new coal mines and the oil sands, or tar sands, in northern Alberta.
  • “new coal projects cannot be built without insurance, and Chubb just dealt a blow to the dozens of companies that are still betting on the expansion of coal globally.”
  • the chief economist of Equinor, the Norwegian oil company previously known as Statoil, has written a report that looks at three scenarios for climate change and its impact on global economies, especially on energy. Only one of those, the report said, would lead to a sustainable path, but that path comes with enormous challenges. To reach that set of targets by 2050, “almost all use of coal must be eradicated
  • oil demand would need to be halved, and natural gas demand trimmed by more than 10 percent.
  • more than half of new cars would have to be electric vehicles by 2030
  • Electricity demand will double, yet wind and solar would equal the entire current electricity output, a leap from current levels
  • Waerness also said that the company currently assumes a carbon price of $55 a ton when considering whether to finance new energy projects
Javier E

Corporate panic about capitalism could be a turning point  - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html

capitalism corporate reform extremism profit shareholder inequality politics culture history

shared by Javier E on 21 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • the Business Roundtable, which represents the chief executives of 192 of the nation’s largest companies. Most of its members signed a statement declaring that making profits for shareholders isn’t a corporation’s sole responsibility. Instead, companies have a broader mission to serve customers, employees, suppliers and communities, too, the statement said.
  • Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and chairman of the Business Roundtable, led the signers who agreed: “Many Americans are struggling. Too often hard work is not rewarded.” Dimon had warned earlier this year in his annual letter to his company’s shareholders that the American Dream was “fraying for many” because of stagnant wages and income inequality.
  • Corporate America fears the system is failing. As Dalio wrote, this is an “existential” moment. The guardians of capitalism seem to realize that they must respond to right-wing populists and left-wing progressives alike or face a worsening political crisis that is already hobbling the country.
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  • The corporate panic about capitalism could be a turning point, opening the way for a future president to begin fixing the problems of stagnant wages and inequality that are at the core of America’s disarray
  • Dalio has even questioned the profit motive, the capitalist holy of holies, arguing that while “usually an effective motivator and resource allocator . . . it is now producing a self-reinforcing feedback loop that widens the income/wealth/opportunity gap to the point that capitalism and the American dream are in jeopardy.”
  • Today’s corporate reformers share the same concern about saving a broken capitalist system as did President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the New Deal era and President Theodore Roosevelt in the Progressive era. Dalio made the historical analogy in his manifesto: “We are now seeing conflicts between populists of the left and populists of the right increasing around the world in much the same way as they did in the 1930s when the income and wealth gaps were comparably large.”
  • America’s historical experience teaches us that economic reform succeeds when it goes mainstream, and that’s what’s happening now.
  • Calm, reassuring, Roosevelt saved capitalism by reforming it, redeeming his campaign pledge to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Who in the current Democratic field can claim this role in 2020? The ground is ready. Even the moguls know it’s time for change.
Javier E

A Boom Time for the Bunker Business and Doomsday Capitalists - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ypse-doomsday-capitalists.html

doomsday rich survival survivalist business bunker crisis

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • in recent years, personalized disaster prep has grown into a multimillion-dollar business, fueled by a seemingly endless stream of new and revamped threats, from climate change to terrorism, cyberattacks and civil unrest.
  • John W. Hoopes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas who spent years studying the myth that the world would end in 2012. He accused doomsday investors of hawking “survival porn,” which he described as a “hypermasculine fantasy” that danger is near and a select few will be able to save themselves and their families — if they are prepared.
  • “Fear sells even better than sex,” Professor Hoopes said. “If you can make people afraid, you can sell them all kinds of stuff,”
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  • She characterized her membership at a survival community called Fortitude Ranch as a reasonable insurance policy.“I don’t like to be dependent on anything, be it big government, big food sources or big pharma,” she said. “My interest isn’t from a place of fear. My interest is from a place of freedom.”
  • In Las Vegas, an underground bunker built by the Avon Cosmetics executive Girard Henderson, featuring a midcentury chef’s kitchen and a wood-burning fireplace, is on sale for $18 million.
  • Bunker clients say they are united not by ideology — liberals, conservatives and political agnostics exist side by side in this world — but by a belief that global forces have left societies increasingly vulnerable to large-scale disaster.
nrashkind

Wall Street tumbles as U.S. virus cases pass 100,000 - Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ases-pass-100000-idUSKBN21E1B5

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Wall Street stocks tumbled on Friday, ending a massive three-day surge after doubts about the fate of the U.S. economy resurfaced and the number of coronavirus cases in the country climbed.
  • The United States has surpassed China and Italy as the country with the most coronavirus cases. The number of U.S. cases passed 100,000, and the death toll exceeded 1,500.
  • “We have still not fully understood the degree of the economic impact,” warned Massud Ghaussy, senior analyst at Nasdaq IR Intelligence in New York.
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  • “Currently, from a policymaker’s perspective, it’s a relative balance between managing the spread of the virus and opening the economy.”
  • But the U.S. stock market benchmark is still down about 25% from its February high.
  • Even after Friday’s drop, the Dow ended 12.8% higher, its best week since 1938.
  • Many investors see a strong risk the market could fall deeply again as coronavirus infections increase and more people die, however.
  • U.S. consumer sentiment dropped to a near 3-1/2-year low in March, according to a survey released on Friday, a day after data showed a record 3 million surge in jobless claims last week.
  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI slumped 4.06% to end at 21,636.78 points, while the S&P 500 .SPX lost 3.37% to 2,541.47.
  • The Nasdaq Composite .IXIC dropped 3.79% to 7,502.38.
  • Volume on U.S. exchanges was 13.4 billion shares, its lowest since March 5, according to Refinitiv data.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Some Republicans Are Blocking New Coronavirus Relief - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-coronavirus-economy.html

ideology right-wing policy politics US crisis trump economic gop rescue

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Given the scale of the economic carnage — 22 million jobs lost in four weeks — we need another huge relief program, both to limit financial hardship and to avoid economic damage that will persist even when the pandemic fades.
  • But we may not get the program we need, because anti-government ideologues, who briefly got quiet as the magnitude of the Covid-19 shock became apparent, are back to their usual tricks.
  • Right now the economy is in the equivalent of a medically induced coma, with whole sectors shut down to limit social contact and hence slow the spread of the coronavirus. We can’t bring the economy out of this coma until, at minimum, we have sharply reduced the rate of new infections and dramatically increased testing so that we can quickly respond to any new outbreaks.
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  • Since we’re nowhere close to that point — in particular, testing is still far behind what’s needed — we’re months away from a safe end of the lockdown. This is causing severe hardship for workers, businesses, hospitals and — last but not least — state and local governments, which unlike the federal government must balance their budgets.
  • Yet at the moment further relief legislation is stalled. And let’s be clear: Republicans are responsible for the impasse.
  • But the special loan program for small businesses has already been exhausted. State and city governments are reporting drastic losses in revenue and soaring expenses. And the Postal Service is on the edge of bankruptcy.
  • So we need another large relief package, targeted at these gaps. Where would the money come from? Just borrow it. Right now, the economy is awash in excess savings with nowhere to go. The interest rate on inflation-protected federal bonds is minus 0.56 percent; in effect, investors are willing to pay our government to make use of their money
  • What policy can and should do is mitigate that hardship. And the last relief package did, in fact, do a lot of the right things. But it didn’t do enough of them.
  • It’s true that Senate Republicans are trying to push through an extra $250 billion in small-business lending — and Democrats are willing to go along. But the Democrats also insist that the package include substantial aid for hospitals and for state and local governments. And Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is refusing to include this aid.
  • Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows what is really happening: McConnell is trying to get more money for businesses while continuing to shortchange state and local governments. After all, “starve the beast” — forcing governments to cut services by depriving them of resources — has been Republican strategy for decades
  • At a basic level, then, anti-government ideologues are preventing us from responding adequately to the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression.
  • Their obstructionism will cause vast suffering, as crucial public services are curtailed. It will also compound the economic damage.
  • In the near future, we’ll see millions of unnecessary job losses as impoverished families cut back spending, as local governments lay off teachers and firefighters, as the post office, if it survives at all, becomes a shadow of its former self.
  • And many of these job losses will probably persist even after the pandemic subsides.
  • If there’s a silver lining to all this, it is that the people sabotaging our response to Covid-19 economics may also be sabotaging their own political future. Trump is, after all, counting on rapid economic recovery to erase public memories of his disastrous handling of the pandemic itself. Yet he and his allies in the Senate are making such a recovery much less likely.
johnsonel7

Campaign live updates: Democrats jockey for support ahead of S.C. primary - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...democratic-debate

Democratic debate 2020 campaign politics

shared by johnsonel7 on 27 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • The Democratic presidential candidates jockeyed for position in South Carolina on Wednesday after a contentious debate the night before in Charleston in which they sparred over key policy areas including health-care costs, gun control and foreign affairs in a testy debate — and talked over one another a lot
  • Seven Democrats took the stage for the 10th Democratic debate: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); former vice president Joe Biden; former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg; Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.); Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.); investor Tom Steyer; and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg. Several candidates attacked Sanders for the costs of his health-care proposals, and others squared off with Bloomberg over a range of policy matters, including his massive wealth.
  • Rep. Clyburn endorses Biden, offering a boost ahead of S.C. primarySanders takes fire in an unruly debate that left no candidate truly enhanced
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  • Bernie Sanders refuses to get bogged down – or pinned down – on specifics during Democratic debate
  • Bloomberg improves from his last debate — but is it enough?
Javier E

iHeartMedia laid off hundreds of radio DJs. Is AI to blame? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...io-artificial-intelligence-djs

automation radio media robot culture communications

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • When iHeartMedia announced this month it would fire hundreds of workers across the country, the radio conglomerate said the restructuring was critical to take advantage of its “significant investments … in technology and artificial intelligence.” In a companywide email, chief executive Bob Pittman said the “employee dislocation” was “the unfortunate price we pay to modernize the company.
  • But laid-off employees like D’Edwin “Big Kosh” Walton, who made $12 an hour as an on-air personality for the Columbus, Ohio, hip-hop station 106.7 the Beat, don’t buy it. Walton doesn’t blame the cuts on a computer; he blames them on the company’s top executives, whose “coldblooded, calculated move” cost people their jobs.
  • It “ripped my [expletive] heart out,” Walton said. “The people at the top don’t know who we are at the bottom. They don’t understand the relationships and the connections we had with the communities. And that’s the worst part: They don’t care.”
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  • The dominant player in U.S. radio, which owns the online music service iHeartRadio and more than 850 local stations across the United States, has called AI the muscle it needs to fend off rivals, recapture listeners and emerge from bankruptcy
  • The company, which now uses software to schedule music, analyze research and mix songs, plans to consolidate offices around what executives call “AI-enabled Centers of Excellence.”
  • The company’s shift seems in line with a corporate America that is increasingly embracing automation, using technological advances to take over tasks once done by people, boosting profits and cutting costs
  • While the job cuts may sound “inhumane,” she added, they made sense from a Wall Street perspective, given the company’s need to trim costs and improve its profit margins.
  • “This is a typical example of a dying industry that is blaming technology for something that is just absolutely a reduction in force,”
  • iHeartRadio spokeswoman Wendy Goldberg declined to make executives available for comment or provide a total layoff count, saying only that the job cuts were “relatively small” compared with the company’s overall workforce of 12,500 employees
  • Del Colliano estimated that more than 1,000 people would lose their jobs nationwide.
  • iHeartMedia was shifting “jobs to the future from the past,” adding data scientists, podcast producers and other digital teams to help transform the radio broadcaster into a “multiplatform” creator and “America’s #1 audio company.
  • the long-running medium remains a huge business. In November, iHeartMedia reported it took in more than $1.6 billion in broadcast-radio revenue during the first nine months of 2019, and company filings claim that a quarter of a billion listeners still tune in every month to discover new music, catch up on the news or hear from their local DJs.
  • Executives at the Texas-based company have long touted human DJs as their biggest competitive strength, saying in federal securities filings last year that the company was in the “companionship” business because listeners build a “trusted bond and strong relationship” with the on-air personalities they hear every day.
  • its “computational music presentation” AI can help erase the seconds-long gaps between songs that can lead to “a loss of energy, lack of continuity and disquieting sterility.”
  • The system can transition in real time between songs by layering in music, sound effects, voice-over snippets and ads, delivering the style of smooth, seamless playback that has long been the human DJ’s trade.
  • One song wove cleanly into the other through an automated mix of booming sound effects, background music, interview sound bites and station-branding shout-outs (“Super Hi-Fi: Recommended by God”). The smooth transition might have taken a DJ a few minutes to prepare; the computer completed it in a matter of seconds
  • Much of the initial training for these delicate transitions comes from humans, who prerecord voice-overs, select songs, edit audio clips, and classify music by genre, style and mood. Zalon said the machine-learning system has been further refined by iHeartMedia’s human DJs, who have helped identify clumsy transitions and room for future improvements.
  • “To have radio DJs across the country that really care about song transitions and are listening to find everything wrong, that was awesome,” Zalon said. “It gave us hundreds of the world’s best ears. … They almost unwittingly became kind of like our QA [quality assurance] team.”
  • he expects that, in a few years, computer-generated voices could automatically read off the news, tee up interviews and introduce songs, potentially supplanting humans even more. The software performed 315 million musical transitions for listeners in January alone.
  • The company’s chief product officer, Chris Williams, said last year in an interview with the industry news site RadioWorld that “virtual DJs” that could seamlessly interweave chatter, music and ads were “absolutely” coming, and “something we are always thinking about.”
  • That has allowed the company, she said, to free up programming people for more creative pursuits, “embedding our radio stations into the communities and lives of our listeners better and deeper than they have been before.”
  • In 2008, to gain control of the radio and billboard titan then known as Clear Channel, the private-equity firms Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners staged a leveraged buyout, weighing the company down with a mountain of borrowed cash they needed to seal the deal.
  • The audacious move left the radio giant saddled with more than $20 billion in debt, just as the Great Recession kicked off and radio’s strengths began to rust. The debt would kneecap the company for the next decade, forcing it to pay more toward interest payments some years than it earned in revenue.
  • In the year the company filed for bankruptcy, Pittman, the company’s chief and a former head of MTV and AOL, was paid roughly $13 million in salary and bonus pay, nearly three times what he made in 2016
  • The company’s push to shrink and subsume local stations was also made possible by deregulation. In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission ditched a rule requiring radio stations to maintain a studio near where they were broadcasting. Local DJs have since been further replaced by prerecorded substitutes, sometimes from hundreds of miles away.
  • Ashley “Z” Elzinga, a former on-air personality for 95.6 KISS FM in Cleveland, said she was upbeat about the future but frustrated that the company had said the layoffs touched only a “relatively small” slice of its workforce. “I gave my life to this,” she said. “I moved my life, moved my family.
  • Since the layoffs, they’ve been inundated with messages from listeners who said they couldn’t imagine their daily lives without them. They said they don’t expect a computer-generated system will satisfy listeners or fill that void.
  • “It was something I was really looking forward to making a future out of. And in the blink of an eye, all of that stopped for me,” he said. “That’s the painful part. They just killed what I thought was the future for me.”
Javier E

Opinion | The Age of Decadence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...western-society-decadence.html

decadence growth decline dystopia culture crisis history

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Following in the footsteps of the great cultural critic Jacques Barzun, we can say that decadence refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development
  • Under decadence, Barzun wrote, “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.” He added, “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.” And crucially, the stagnation is often a consequence of previous development: The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own success.
  • “What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash,” wrote W.H. Auden of that endless autumn, but rather that “it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.”
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  • what happens when an extraordinarily rich society can’t find enough new ideas that justify investing all its stockpiled wealth. We inflate bubbles and then pop them, invest in Theranos and then repent, and the supposed cutting edge of capitalism is increasingly defined by technologies that have almost arrived, business models that are on their way to profitability, by runways that go on and on without the plane achieving takeoff.
  • what this tells us, unfortunately, is that 21st-century growth and innovation are not at all that we were promised they would be.
  • slowly compounding growth is not the same as dynamism. American entrepreneurship has been declining since the 1970s: Early in the Jimmy Carter presidency, 17 percent of all United States businesses had been founded in the previous year; by the start of Barack Obama’s second term, that rate was about 10 percent. In the late 1980s, almost half of United States companies were “young,” meaning less than five years old; by the Great Recession, that share was down to only 39 percent, and the share of “old” firms (founded more than 15 years ago) rose from 22 percent to 34 percent over a similar period
  • From World War II through the 1980s, according to a recent report from Senator Marco Rubio’s office, private domestic investment often approached 10 percent of G.D.P.; in 2019, despite a corporate tax cut intended to get money off the sidelines, the investment-to-G.D.P. ratio was less than half of that.
  • This suggests that the people with the most experience starting businesses look around at their investment opportunities and see many more start-ups that resemble Theranos than resemble Amazon, let alone the behemoths of the old economy.
  • the dearth of corporate investment also means that the steady climb of the stock market has boosted the wealth of a rentier class — basically, already-rich investors getting richer off dividends — rather than reflecting surging prosperity in general.
  • In 2017 a group of economists published a paper asking, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” The answer was a clear yes: “We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.”
  • In his 2011 book “The Great Stagnation,” Tyler Cowen cited an analysis from the Pentagon physicist Jonathan Huebner, who modeled an innovations-to-population ratio for the last 600 years: It shows a slowly ascending arc through the late 19th century, when major inventions were rather easy to conceive and adopt, and a steepening decline ever since, as rich countries spend more and more on research to diminishing returns.
  • the trends reveal a slowdown, a mounting difficulty in achieving breakthroughs — a bottleneck if you’re optimistic, a ceiling if you aren’t
  • the relative exception, the internet and all its wonders, highlights the general pattern.
  • The Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, one of the most persuasive theorists of stagnation, points out that the period from 1840 to 1970 featured dramatic growth and innovation across multiple arenas — energy and transportation and medicine and agriculture and communication and the built environment.
  • in the last two generations, progress has become increasingly monodimensional — all tech and nothing else.
  • We used to travel faster, build bigger, live longer; now we communicate faster, chatter more, snap more selfies.
  • Take a single one of the great breakthroughs of the industrial age — planes and trains and automobiles, antibiotics and indoor plumbing — and it still looms larger in our everyday existence than all of the contributions of the tech revolution combined.
  • With this stagnation comes social torpor. America is a more peaceable country than it was in 1970 or 1990, with lower crime rates and safer streets and better-behaved kids
  • it’s also a country where that supposedly most American of qualities, wanderlust, has markedly declined: Americans no longer “go west” (or east or north or south) in search of opportunity the way they did 50 years ago; the rate at which people move between states has fallen from 3.5 percent in the early 1970s to 1.4 percent in 2010. Nor do Americans change jobs as often as they once did.
  • Meanwhile, those well-behaved young people are more depressed than prior cohorts, less likely to drive drunk or get pregnant but more tempted toward self-harm
  • once we crossed over into permanent below-replacement territory, the birth dearth began undercutting the very forces (youth, risk -taking, dynamism) necessary for continued growth, meaning that any further gains to individual welfare are coming at the future’s expense.
  • then there is the opioid epidemic, whose spread across the unhappiest parts of white America passed almost unnoticed in elite circles for a while because the drug itself quiets rather than inflames, supplying a gentle euphoria that lets its users simply slip away, day by day and bit by bit, without causing anyone any trouble
  • In the land of the lotus eaters, people are also less likely to invest in the future in the most literal of ways. The United States birthrate was once an outlier among developed countries, but since the Great Recession, it has descended rapidly, converging with the wealthy world’s general below-replacement norm.
  • This demographic decline worsens economic stagnation; economists reckoning with its impact keep finding stark effects. A 2016 analysis found that a 10 percent increase in the fraction of the population over 60 decreased the growth rate of states’ per capita G.D.P. by 5.5 percent.
  • This doesn’t excuse the grifting or the rage stoking, especially presidential grifting and rage stoking, and it doesn’t make the mass shootings, when they come, any less horrific. But it’s important context for thinking about whether online politics is really carrying our society downward into civil strife
  • This feedback loop — in which sterility feeds stagnation, which further discourages childbearing, which sinks society ever-deeper into old age — makes demographic decline a clear example of how decadence overtakes a civilization
  • Both populism and socialism, Trump and Bernie Sanders, represent expressions of discontent with decadence, rebellions against the technocratic management of stagnation that defined the Obama era.
  • in practical terms the populist era has mostly delivered a new and deeper stalemate. From Trump’s Washington to the capitals of Europe, Western politics is now polarized between anti-establishment forces that are unprepared to competently govern and an establishment that’s too disliked to effectively rule.
  • The hysteria with which we’re experiencing them may represent nothing more than the way that a decadent society manages its political passions, by encouraging people to playact extremism, to re-enact the 1930s or 1968 on social media, to approach radical politics as a sport, a hobby, a kick to the body chemistry, that doesn’t put anything in their relatively comfortable late-modern lives at risk.
  • The terrorist in 21st-century America isn’t the guy who sees more deeply than the rest; he’s the guy who doesn’t get it, who takes the stuff he reads on the internet literally in a way that most of the people posting don’t
  • For adults, the increasingly legal drug of choice is marijuana, whose prototypical user is a relaxed and harmless figure — comfortably numb, experiencing stagnation as a chill good time.
  • It suggests that the virtual realm might make our battles more ferocious but also more performative and empty; and that online rage is a steam-venting technology for a society that is misgoverned, stagnant and yet, ultimately, far more stable than it looks on Twitter
  • in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth.
  • Human beings can still live vigorously amid a general stagnation, be fruitful amid sterility, be creative amid repetition. And the decadent society, unlike the full dystopia, allows those signs of contradictions to exist
  • The last hundred-odd years of Western history offer plenty of examples of how the attempt to throw off decadence can bring in far worse evils, from the craving for Meaning and Action that piled corpses at Verdun and Passchendaele, to the nostalgic yearning for the Cold War that inspired post-9/11 crusading and led to a military quagmire in the Middle East.
  • So you can even build a case for decadence, not as a falling-off or disappointing end, but as a healthy balance between the misery of poverty and the dangers of growth for growth’s sake
  • A sustainable decadence, if you will, in which the crucial task for 21st-century humanity would be making the most of a prosperous stagnation: learning to temper our expectations and live within limits; making sure existing resources are distributed more justly; using education to lift people into the sunlit uplands of the creative class; and doing everything we can to help poorer countries transition successfully into our current position
  • this argument carries you only so far. Even if the dystopia never quite arrives, the longer a period of stagnation continues, the narrower the space for fecundity and piety, memory and invention, creativity and daring.
  • So decadence must be critiqued and resisted
  • by the hope that where there’s stability, there also might eventually be renewal,
  • The next renaissance will be necessarily different, but realism about our own situation should make us more inclined, not less, to look and hope for one — for the day when our culture feels more fruitful, our politics less futile and the frontiers that seem closed today are opened once again.
Javier E

One Simple Idea That Explains Why the Economy Is in Great Danger - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onomy-crisis-demand-shock.html

economy pandemic danger depression recession history crisis

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • One person’s spending is another person’s income. That, in a single sentence, is what the $87 trillion global economy is.
  • That relationship, between spending and income, consumption and production, is at the core of how a capitalist economy works. It is the basis of a perpetual motion machine. We buy the things we want and need, and in exchange give money to the people who produced those things, who in turn use that money to buy the things they want and need, and so on, forever.
  • What is so deeply worrying about the potential economic ripple effects of the virus is that it requires this perpetual motion machine to come to a near-complete stop across large chunks of the economy, for an indeterminate period of time.
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  • We simply don’t know how the economic machine will respond to the damage that is starting to occur, nor how hard or easy it will be to turn it back on again
  • That adds up to $2.1 trillion a year, 14 percent of total consumption spending — which appears likely to dry up for at least a few weeks and maybe longer.
  • So what might such a collapse in spending in those major categories mean for the other side of the ledger, incomes?
  • That revenue from those sectors goes a lot of places. It pays employees for their labor directly. It goes to suppliers. It pays taxes that finance the police and schoolteachers, rent that rewards property owners, and profits that accrue to investors. All of those flows of cash are in danger as consumption spending plunges.
  • Together, they accounted for $574 billion in total employee compensation in 2018, about 10 percent of the total. It was spread among 13.8 million full-time equivalent employees.
  • In danger is the $11 billion a week they normally pay their employees, not to mention all those payments for rent, debt service and property taxes.
  • Just the potential initial effects from all those restaurant meals not eaten, hotel rooms sitting empty and aircraft temporarily mothballed are potentially huge. And that’s before accounting for the ways those could ripple into second- and third-order effects.
  • what if the plunging price of oil (caused by both geopolitical machinations and the global collapse of demand resulting from coronavirus effects) leads to widespread job losses and bankruptcies in energy-producing areas?
  • How to Win in a Winner-Take-All-World
katherineharron

Market politics: Trump loses his touch with the markets as coronavirus threat grows - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The stark news came in shortly after noon on Wednesday: The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped almost 10%, wiping out all the gains logged since President Donald Trump took office, thanks to investors craving more government spending to offset the impact from the coronavirus.
  • Trump has often dismissed market fluctuations as part of a natural correction, but several people close to the President say he places as much importance on the health of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for validation of his job performance as he does on his polling numbers.Unlike previous Presidents, who traditionally avoided trying to influence the market, Trump's closest advisers say he's not concerned with fueling market volatility every time he appears at the podium. Read MoreIn part, he doesn't believe he's to blame, said a senior administration official.
Javier E

Opinion | A Complete List of Trump's Attempts to Play Down Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-coronavirus.html

trump Covid-19 pandemic

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • In the weeks that followed, Trump faced a series of choices. He could have taken aggressive measures to slow the spread of the virus. He could have insisted that the United States ramp up efforts to produce test kits. He could have emphasized the risks that the virus presented and urged Americans to take precautions if they had reason to believe they were sick. He could have used the powers of the presidency to reduce the number of people who would ultimately get sick.
  • He did none of those things
  • Below are the facts — a timeline of what the president was saying, alongside statements from public-health experts as well as data on the virus.
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  • I’ve reviewed all of his public statements and actions on coronavirus over the last two months, and they show a president who put almost no priority on public health. Trump’s priorities were different: Making the virus sound like a minor nuisance. Exaggerating his administration’s response. Blaming foreigners and, anachronistically, the Obama administration. Claiming incorrectly that the situation was improving. Trying to cheer up stock market investors
  • Almost two decades ago, during George W. Bush’s presidency, the federal government developed guidelines for communicating during a public-health crisis. Among the core principles are “be first,” “be right,” “be credible,” “show respect” and “promote action.”But the Trump administration’s response to coronavirus, as a Washington Post news story put it, is “breaking almost every rule in the book.”
  • At every point, experts have emphasized that the country could reduce those terrible numbers by taking action. And at almost every point, the president has ignored their advice and insisted, “It’s going to be just fine.”
  • Around the world, the official virus count has climbed above 142,000. In the United States, scientists expect that between tens of millions and 215 million Americans will ultimately be infected, and the death toll could range from the tens of thousands to 1.7 million.
Javier E

Will We Forgive Amazon When This Is Over? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-when-this-is-over-11586577604

amazon crisis

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • all is far from well in the kingdom of Bezos. At a defining moment for the company, it is letting customers down.
  • the promise to ship anything to our doorstep in a day or two that has gained it the trust of an astonishing 112 million Prime members in the U.S. (a nation of 129 million households) has evaporated nearly overnight.
  • it feels like Amazon is little better than any other retailer at getting us what we need, when we need it.
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  • The fact that Amazon’s retail operations are functioning at all is a testament to the flexibility of the company’s infrastructure during a health crisis that few if any companies were prepared for.
  • But the crisis is laying bare the cracks in Amazon’s ability
  • Those cracks include times when up to half the workers in some of the company’s facilities haven’t shown up, with some saying it was due to their fear they wouldn’t be adequately protected from coronavirus.
  • It’s also due to Amazon’s just-in-time supply chain, reliance on third-party sellers and largely automated systems of buying and selling that were never designed to handle such a crisis.
  • Amazon shoppers are unable to get many of the essential products the company says it’s prioritizing now.
  • everything considered nonessential takes more time than the two days Amazon conditioned us to expect.
  • as of March, 55% of Americans polled had ordered groceries online, compared with 36% two years ago.
  • One-third of respondents said the first time they had ever ordered groceries online was in the past 30 days, and 60% of respondents used Amazon to order groceries.
  • The infrastructure Amazon built pushed the entire e-commerce industry toward ever broader selection delivered ever faster.
  • In the mid-2010s, Amazon initiated a program called “hands off the wheel,” which replaced many of the functions of Amazon’s white-collar retail workers—those responsible for managing inventory and negotiating with sellers—with AI and automated systems
  • Amazon’s systems respond more quickly to increases in demand than humans could, but it also leads to breakdowns when they encounter unexpected shocks—e.g., a global pandemic
  • In the week ending March 28, Americans spent 47% more on consumer packaged goods purchased online when compared with the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen and Rakuten Intelligence.
  • Amazon has hired 80,000 additional workers in just the past few weeks, as part of its pledge to hire 100,000 new permanent workers. It has also raised its base wage from $15 an hour to $17, through April.
  • with more workers pouring into Amazon’s facilities, and more forced to stay by the lack of alternatives, there could be more protests by employees and more concessions from historically union-averse management
  • Already, the company has instituted double pay for overtime, paid leave for associates with confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19, a tripling of its janitorial staff and audits of its own facilities to comply with these measures.
  • Consumers felt, in good times anyway, that “I can trust the item, I know it’s a good price, I have transparency on when I’m going to receive it, and if I have issues Amazon will work on my behalf,” he adds.
  • A big edge Amazon holds over competitors is that it can cover losses or scant retail margins with a combination of good will from investors and a cross-subsidy from its booming cloud business, Amazon Web Services.
  • Of all cloud providers, Amazon is the best positioned to benefit both in the long and short term from surging demand, Eric Sheridan, an analyst at UBS, wrote in a Monday note surveying the industry.
  • All this increased usage means more revenue for AWS and more profit for its parent company. In turn, that means more opportunity for Amazon to, as Mr. Bezos famously put it, turn its retail competitors’ margins into Amazon’s opportunity.
  • for Amazon, a company that may already be too big for its own good, it could lead to more of the regulatory scrutiny that its success was drawing even before coronavirus.
  • An ever greater variety of customers will view Amazon as a basic utility but, wary of overreliance, will explore alternatives, too. The bill for Mr. Bezos’ possibly Faustian bargain with the universe—that everyone loves an innovative and ruthless competitor, even when it becomes dominant—may finally come due.
Javier E

How the Coronavirus Will Change Young People's Lives - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...609862

social effects pandemic crisis culture politics financial youths Generation C

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us that the people in this group could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.
  • With many local businesses closed or viewed as potential vectors of disease, pandemic conditions have already funneled more money to Amazon and its large-scale competitors, including Walmart and Costco.
  • “Epidemics are really bad for economies,”
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • “We’re going to see a whole bunch of college graduates and people finishing graduate programs this summer who are going to really struggle to find work.”
  • People just starting out now, and those who will begin their adult lives in the years following the pandemic, will be asked to walk a financial tightrope with no practice and, for most, no safety net. Fewer of them will be able to turn to their parents or other family members for significant help
  • To gauge what’s in store for job-seekers, it might be most useful to look to a different, more recent kind of disaster: the 2008 financial collapse. More than a decade later, its effects are widely understood to have been catastrophic to the financial futures of those who were in their teens and 20s when it hit.
  • Not only did jobs dry up, but federal relief dollars mostly went to large employers such as banks and insurance companies instead of to workers themselves.
  • investors picked off dirt-cheap foreclosures to flip them for wealthier buyers or turn them into rentals, which has helped rising housing prices far outpace American wage growth.
  • Millennials, many of whom spent years twisting in the wind when, under better circumstances, they would have been setting down the professional and social foundations for stable lives, now have less money in savings than previous generations did at the same age. Relatively few of them have bought homes, married, or had children.
  • Just as the nation’s housing stock moved into the hands of fewer people during the Great Recession, small and medium-size businesses might suffer a similar fate after the pandemic, which could be a nightmare for the country’s labor force.
  • Schoolwork, it turns out, is hard to focus on during a slow-rolling global disaster.
  • American restaurants, which employ millions, have been devastated by quarantine restrictions, but national chains such as Papa John’s and Little Caesars are running television ads touting the virus-murdering temperatures of their commercial ovens,
  • The private-equity behemoth Bain Capital is making plans to gobble up desirable companies weakened by the pandemic. The effect could be a quick consolidation of capital, and the fewer companies that control the economy, the worse the economy generally is for workers and consumers.
  • Less competition means lower wages, higher prices, and conglomerates with enough political influence to stave off regulation that might force them to improve wages, worker safety, or job security.
  • as with virtually all problems, grad school is not the answer to whatever the coronavirus might do to your future.
  • there will be “definitely an increase” in people seeking education post-quarantine, taking advantage of loan availability to acquire expertise that might better position them to build a stable life.
  • those decisions have since worsened their economic strain, while not significantly improving professional outcomes.
  • Private universities may suddenly be too expensive, and frequent plane rides to faraway colleges might seem much riskier. Mass delays will affect things like school budgets and admissions for years, but in ways that are difficult to predict.
  • there is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.
  • What will become of Generation C?
  • Many types of classes don’t work particularly well via videochat, such as chemistry and ecology, which in normal times often ask students to participate in lab work or go out into the natural world.
  • “People with a resource base and finances and so forth, they’re going to get through this a whole lot easier than the families who don’t even have a computer for their children to attend school,”
  • Disasters, he told me, tend to illuminate and magnify existing disadvantages that are more easily ignored by those outside the affected communities during the course of everyday life.
  • Disasters also make clear when disadvantages—polluted neighborhoods, scarce local supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, risky jobs—have accumulated over a lifetime, leaving some people far more vulnerable to catastrophe than others
  • Children in those communities already have a harder time accessing quality education and getting into college. Their future prospects look dimmer, now that they’re faced with technical and social obstacles and the trauma of watching family members and friends suffer and die during a pandemic.
  • in moments of great despair, people’s understanding of what’s possible shifts.
  • For that to translate to real change, though, it’s crucial that the reactions to the new world we live in be codified into policy. Clues to post-pandemic policy shifts lie in the kinds of political agitation that were already happening before the virus. “Things that already had some support are more likely to take seed,
  • This is where young people might finally be poised to take some control. The 2008 financial crisis appears to have pushed many Millennials leftward
  • When housing prices soared, wages stagnated, and access to basic health care became more scarce, many young people looked around at the richest nation in the world and wondered who was enjoying all the riches. Policies such as Medicare for All, debt cancellation, environmental protections, wealth taxes, criminal-justice reform, jobs programs, and other broad expansions of the social safety net have become rallying cries for young people who experience American life as a rigged game
  • the pandemic’s quick, brutal explication of the ways employment-based health care and loose labor laws have long hurt working people might make for a formative disaster all its own.
  • “There’s a possibility, particularly with who you’re calling Generation C, that their experience of the pandemic against a backdrop of profoundly fragmented politics could lead to some very necessary revolutionary change,”
  • The seeds of that change might have already been planted in the 2018 midterm elections, when young voters turned up in particularly high numbers and helped elect a group of younger, more progressive candidates both locally and nationally.
  • Younger people “aren’t saddled with Cold War imagery and rhetoric. It doesn’t have the same power over our imaginations,”
  • a subset of young voters believes that some American conservatives have cried wolf, deriding everything from public libraries to free doctor visits as creeping socialism until the word lost much of its power to scare.
  • the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—if handled poorly by those in power—might be enough to create a future America with free health care, a reformed justice system, and better labor protections for working people.
  • But winds of change rarely kick up debris of just one type. The Great Recession opened the minds of wide swaths of young Americans to left-leaning social programs, but its effects are also at least partially responsible for the Tea Party and the Trump presidency. The chaos of a pandemic opens the door for a stronger social safety net, but also for expanded authoritarianism.
  • Beyond politics and policy, the structures that young people have built on their own to endure the pandemic might change life after it, too. Young Americans have responded to the disaster with a wave of volunteerism, including Arora’s internship-information clearinghouse and mutual-aid groups across the country that deliver groceries to those in need.
  • As strong as people’s reactions are in the middle of a crisis, though, people tend to leave behind the traumatic lessons of a disaster as quickly as they can. “Amnesia sets in until the next crisis,” Schoch-Spana said. “Maybe this is different; maybe it’s big enough and disruptive enough that it changes what we imagine it takes to be safe in the world, so I don’t know
Javier E

Americans Are Paying the Price for Trump's Failures - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...609532

trump response presidency

shared by Javier E on 08 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump
  • Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency
  • Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going?
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  • On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.
  • The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country.
  • The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault
  • That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too
  • Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.
  • The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him
  • The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time.
  • The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities.
  • The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.
  • sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying.
  • Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.
  • Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory.
  • It’s a good guess that the unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer.
  • This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than nations nearer to China
  • Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed.
  • If Trump truly was so trustingly ignorant as late as January 22, the fault was again his own. The Trump administration had cut U.S. public-health staff operating inside China by two-thirds, from 47 in January 2017 to 14 by 2019, an important reason it found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration defunded the position that embedded an epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again obstructing the flow of information to the United States.
  • Yet even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January 27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic in an op-ed in USA Today.
  • Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders early—in fact, he did not truly close them at all.
  • Trump’s actions did little to stop the spread of the virus. The ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings, The New York Times reported.
  • At a House hearing on February 5, a few days after the restrictions went into effect, Ron Klain—who led the Obama administration’s efforts against the Ebola outbreak—condemned the Trump policy as a “travel Band-Aid, not a travel ban.”
  • The president’s top priority through February 2020 was to exact retribution from truth-tellers in the impeachment fight.
  • Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health officials: Keep your mouth shut
  • Throughout the crisis, the top priority of the president, and of everyone who works for the president, has been the protection of his ego
  • Denial became the unofficial policy of the administration through the month of February, and as a result, that of the administration’s surrogates and propagandists.
  • That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scolded a House committee for daring to ask him about the coronavirus. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran.”
  • The president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him.
  • During the pandemic, this psychological deformity has mutated into a deadly strategic vulnerability for the United States.
  • For three-quarters of his presidency, Trump has taken credit for the economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in 2010. That expansion accelerated in 2014, just in time to deliver real prosperity over the past three years
  • The harm done by Trump’s own initiatives, and especially his trade wars, was masked by that continued growth.
  • The economy Trump inherited became his all-purpose answer to his critics. Did he break laws, corrupt the Treasury, appoint cronies, and tell lies? So what? Unemployment was down, the stock market up.
  • On February 28, very few Americans had heard of an estimated death toll of 35,000 to 40,000, but Trump had heard it. And his answer to that estimate was: “So far, we have lost nobody.” He conceded, “It doesn’t mean we won’t.” But he returned to his happy talk. “We are totally prepared.” And as always, it was the media's fault. “You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”
  • on February 28, it was still not too late to arrange an orderly distribution of medical supplies to the states, not too late to coordinate with U.S. allies, not too late to close the Florida beaches before spring break, not too late to bring passengers home from cruise lines, not too late to ensure that state unemployment-insurance offices were staffed and ready, not too late for local governments to get funds to food banks, not too late to begin social distancing fast and early
  • Stay-at-home orders could have been put into effect on March 1, not in late March and early April.
  • So much time had been wasted by the end of February. So many opportunities had been squandered. But even then, the shock could have been limited. Instead, Trump and his inner circle plunged deeper into two weeks of lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy.
  • Kudlow repeated his advice that it was a good time to buy stocks on CNBC on March 6 after another bad week for the financial markets. As late as March 9, Trump was still arguing that the coronavirus would be no worse than the seasonal flu.
  • The overwhelmed president responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: He shifted the blame to others.
  • Trump’s instinct to dodge and blame had devastating consequences for Americans. Every governor and mayor who needed the federal government to take action, every science and medical adviser who hoped to prevent Trump from doing something stupid or crazy, had to reckon with Trump’s psychic needs as their single biggest problem.
  • Governors got the message too. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” Trump explained at a White House press briefing on March 27. The federal response has been dogged by suspicions of favoritism for political and personal allies of Trump. The District of Columbia has seen its requests denied, while Florida gets everything it asks for.
  • The Trump administration is allocating some supplies through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but has made the deliberate choice to allow large volumes of crucial supplies to continue to be distributed by commercial firms to their clients. That has left state governments bidding against one another, as if the 1787 Constitution had never been signed, and we have no national government.
  • Around the world, allies are registering that in an emergency, when it matters most, the United States has utterly failed to lead
  • s the pandemic kills, as the economic depression tightens its grip, Donald Trump has consistently put his own needs first. Right now, when his only care should be to beat the pandemic, Trump is renegotiating his debts with his bankers and lease payments with Palm Beach County.
  • He has never tried to be president of the whole United States, but at most 46 percent of it, to the extent that serving even the 46 percent has been consistent with his supreme concerns: stealing, loafing, and whining.
  • Now he is not even serving the 46 percent. The people most victimized by his lies and fantasies are the people who trusted him, the more conservative Americans who harmed themselves to prove their loyalty to Trump.
  • Governments often fail. From Pearl Harbor to the financial crisis of 2008, you can itemize a long list of missed warnings and overlooked dangers that cost lives and inflicted hardship. But in the past, Americans could at least expect public spirit and civic concern from their presidents.
  • Trump has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic vanity first.
  • rump has taken millions in payments from the Treasury. He has taken millions in payments from U.S. businesses and foreign governments. He has taken millions in payments from the Republican Party and his own inaugural committee. He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take that.
  • Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head.
Javier E

The Coronavirus Revealed America's Failures - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...610261

American idea failure politics pandemic failed state culture history

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • hen the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years.
  • It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
  • The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France.
  • Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
  • he administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
  • it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
  • This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong.
  • Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified i
  • This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders
  • The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.
  • Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests.
  • Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party
  • His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.
  • Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests
  • If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end
  • This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.
  • The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long
  • An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.
  • Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers
  • An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home.
  • It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation.
  • putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.
  • We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.
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